About Barrie Scardino Bradley

Barrie Scardino Bradley is an award-winning architectural writer who has published numerous books and articles on Texas architecture and culture, including Houston’s Forgotten Heritage (1991, Rice University Press); Clayton’s Galveston: The Architecture of N. J. Clayton and his Contemporaries (2000, Texas A&M University Press); Ephemeral City: Cite Looks at Houston (2003, University of Texas Press); Houston’s Hermann Park: A Century of Community (2014, Texas A&M University Press); and Fair Winds: The History of Kirby Corporation (2017, Herring Press). She has also edited several publications, significantly the Houston Architectural Guidebook (2012, AIA Houston).

Improbable Metropolis: Houston’s Architectural and Urban History is in production by the University of Texas Press for release in May 2020. Along with Stephen Fox and Michelangelo Sabatino, Bradley is editor of Making Houston Modern: Howard Barnstone’s Life and Architecture, scheduled for release in June 2020 also by the University of Texas Press. 

Bradley is a native of Savannah, Georgia, a graduate of Duke University (BA/English) and the University of Southern California (MS/Library Science). She attended the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA, which she left before completing an MA in Architecture in 1979 to move with her family to Houston. She is also currently working on a memoir of her childhood in Savannah.

She began her Texas career in the fall of 1979 on the research faculty of the Rice University School of Architecture as the senior researcher on what became a six-volume study: the Houston Architectural Survey (1981). After completion of the survey, she became the first architectural archivist for the City of Houston at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center of the Houston Public Library. She left that position to return to Rice as a researcher and eventually became the managing editor of the Rice Design Alliance’s publication, Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston. 

After living and writing in New York City from 1998 to 2004, she returned to Houston and became executive director of the American Institute of Architects, Houston Chapter, and the Houston Architecture Foundation until 2011 when she moved to Beaumont, Texas. She currently lives in Bluffton, SC,  with her husband, Jerry Bradley, University Professor of English at Lamar University, and spends as much time as she can with the families of her three children in Savannah, Austin, and Boston.